But most people don’t seem to care about having the law apply the same to all people, so I make a strictly utilitarian case for low tax rates in today’s New York Post. Here some of what I wrote.

Whether it’s through the Buffett Rule, higher income-tax rates or double taxation of dividends and capital gains, President Obama often demands that “rich” taxpayers and big corporations send more money to Washington. But…trying to get more money from upper-income taxpayers is like playing whack-a-mole. So long as tax rates are high, rich people will figure out ways to protect their income.It doesn’t take a tax genius; any rich person can make a phone call or hit a few computer keys and shift his or her investments to tax-free municipal bonds. It’s not good for the economy when capital gets diverted to help finance the excess spending of Detroit or California, but it’s an effective way of stiff-arming the IRS. Or the rich can play the green-energy scam, getting all sorts of credits to offset their tax liabilities. …Even if lawmakers abolished the various tax-code distortions, they might still be disappointed. The one sure way for rich people to lower their tax bills is by generating less income. …This isn’t some sort of modern-day revelation. Andrew Mellon, a Treasury secretary during the 1920s, noted that “the history of taxation shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid. The high rates inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business.”

Unlike the rest of us, the rich have a great ability to alter the timing, amount and composition of their income. That’s because, according to IRS data, those with more than $1 million of adjusted gross income get only 33 percent of it from wages and salaries. The super-rich (those with income above $10 million) rely on wages and salaries for only 19 percent of their income. In 1980, when the top tax rate was 70 percent, rich people (those with incomes of more than $200,000) reported about $36 billion of income; the IRS collected about $19 billion of that amount. So what happened when President Ronald Reagan lowered the top tax rate to 28 percent by 1988? Did revenue fall proportionately, to about $8 billion? Folks on the left thought that would happen, complaining that Reagan’s “tax cuts for the rich” would starve the government of revenue and give upper-income taxpayers a free ride. But if we look at the 1988 IRS data, rich people paid more than $99 billion to Uncle Sam. That is, because rich taxpayers were willing to earn and report much more income, the government collected five times as much revenue with a lower rate.

I also included above, for readers of this blog, a table with the raw numbers from the IRS. Feel free to click for a larger image and see how the “rich” responded to better tax policy.

Obama wants to run the experiment in reverse. He hasn’t proposed to push the top tax rate up to 70 percent, thank goodness, but the combined effect of his class-warfare policies would mean a big increase in marginal tax rates. That might be good for workers in China, India or Ireland, because American jobs and investment would migrate to those places. But it’s not the right policy for the United States.

In other words, even if you’re a leftist and your main goal is giving the government more revenue, higher tax rates are a bad idea. The rich will simply figure out ways to protect their earnings while the rest of us suffer because the economy loses some of its dynamism.

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An outstanding share! I have just forwarded this onto a co-worker who has been conducting a little homework on this. And he actually bought me lunch due to the fact that I found it for him… lol. So allow me to reword this…. Thanks for the meal!! But yeah, thanks for spending the time to discuss this subject here on your web site.

The overriding narrative that will determine your future and the future of your children is simple, but very hard for western voter lemmings to accept:

Three billion competitors are steepening their effort-reward curves while one billion western voter lemmings are flattening theirs. The writing is on the wall.

Up until a couple of decades ago, most of the three billion people of the now developing world were living in an inert state, under a virtually flat effort-reward curve. But now, even their totalitarian societies were finally forced to figure it out, and they are now transitioning to more natural effort-reward curves. The result: An incredible competitive pressure juggernaut on the west, from the three billion people they once took for dead.

How are western world lemmings reacting to this competitive challenge? : By FLATTENING their effort-reward curves. What will happen? The writing is on the wall.

Three billion competitors are steepening their effort-reward curves while one billion western voter lemmings are flattening theirs. The writing is on the wall. The western world is on the well travelled road to decline.

But why do western voters react in such suicidal way? Simple human nature and the inherent politico-economic deception and incentives of the political class – which bamboozle the electorate with solutions centered around the very product of politics: Mandatory collectivism, as in macro-economic perpetual motion machines, supposedly able to generate more prosperity from flatter effort-reward curves.

Competition from the three billion strong emerging world, stresses the western voter economically, his relative competitiveness waning, so the western voter predictably reaches for the seemingly least painful solution: Direct redistribution (as in Obama class-warfare) and indirect redistribution (as in Paul Krugman style macro-economic gimmicks i.e. supposedly covert ways to redistribute the rewards of production, past and present). The situation gets worse, the deadly embrace of a vicious spiral of decline.

So it won’t work. And the price to be paid will be none less than definitive decline, absorption of the once prosperous western world into the rising world economic average. The western world lemming masses, and Paul Krugman, will find out that competent people, especially competent people, are hard to fool, while class-warfare in chief Obama will find that competent people cannot be coerced into working for others. Perhaps even more detrimentally, they will also discover that when majorities are given the temporary opportunity to more indolence (by being partially, though inevitably only temporarily, insulated from the consequences of mediocrity) then they will simply take such opportunity to indolence and lower production.

Bottom line: Three billion are steepening their once flat effort-reward curves. One billion western voter lemmings are flattening their effort-reward curves. Result: RAPID DECLINE.

Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy are now in a futile attempt to learn this lesson – Ireland is somewhat of an outlier in this mix – France and the rest of Europe are in line to follow soon, riding along on their structurally anemic 1-2% annual growth trendlines drowned in world average growing at 5%. The US seems to have finally entered the same road as the rest of the western world.

But the decline can actually be fun,… in the beginning. Just ask the Greeks and Europeans in general. “Free” healthcare, “free” education, “free” basic retirement, “free” the most important basic things in life – until all the competitive advantage built over past decades, if not centuries, is squandered in a couple of short decades, by voter lemmings that delusionally think that it will last at least through their lifetimes. So have fun, but do secure a life boat before you join the final party on the deck of the Western voter lemming Titanic. There was a time to change course, but in 2008, USS America crossed the 50 degree latitude.

…and though it will probably irk Mr. Mitchell, I have to say: His favorite character OBL had a lot to do with steering America past the gates of mandatory collectivism and decay. When history is written, he will turn out as one of the pivotal characters in America’s decline.

Way to go Dan. I have emailed this on to the President and I know that he may not personally read it but he does have time to sit down and write back 10 people per day. I have a 1 out of 20,000 chance since he gets that many letters a day.